I was in touch with the Muslim Council after their statement and we are determined to speak and act in solidarity with one another. The centre we established here in the City, St Ethelburga's Centre for Preventing and Transforming conflict has been working recently with Muslim students and we have been able to contact our friends as part of an effort to ensure that no one will be able to exploit this time of grief and anxiety.

One bright light was the way the emergency services responded and I am very proud of the role played by the clergy who worked alongside the emergency services and of course in the hospitals to which the injured were taken. The response of local parishes was prompt, energetic and imaginative and the crisis certainly illustrated the virtues of having a local parish network with resident clergy. Yesterday was such a contrast to the euphoria of Wednesday. For us in St Paul's it was not only the news of the success of the Olympic bid but the gathering here of three thousand people to hear Kofi Annan and Gordon Brown set out their hopes for the G8 summit. The Cathedral was packed and alas the doors had to be closed when the queue to get in still stretched as far as the underground station. The atmosphere was electric. People were passionately engaged with the question of what they as well as governments could do to alleviate global poverty.

That is the real agenda in today's world and by contrast yesterday's actions simply added to the suffering and were a tragic irrelevance. It is useless to speculate on the state of mind of the people who cold bloodedly planned and executed this atrocity but is a sin against God and against every decent human feeling.

With all this in mind does religion help, is it useless or even worse part of the problem?

One thing is clear, false religion is part of the problem. The attitude which says - it doesn't really matter what you believe as along as you are sincere - will not do. It belongs to the world of the day before yesterday when people in the west had the delusion that religion was a harmless fantasy left over from the pre-rational age.

False religion is awesomely powerful and destructive. What I am talking about is not of course other world faiths but a phenomenon which is a threat to all genuine spiritual ways. The Bible calls this threat idolatry. It is not so much worshipping idols like Moloch - there is as far as I know remarkably little Moloch worship in the City of London; it is projecting parts of ourselves, our anger, our resentment and organising our thoughts and actions around these projections.

The true and living God who communicated supremely in the suffering love of his human face Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh is not a God who murders the innocent.

There is no excuse for not being serious about religious education at every level. In the Ethelburga Centre we are hosts to the London part of the scriptural reasoning project which brings together competent Jewish Christian and Muslim scholars not to say something evidently untrue like "all religions are really saying the same thing" but to study their own scriptures from the standpoint of believers but in company with believers in the other Abrahamic faiths. The horizon is defined by some of the contemporary problems like conflict and poverty which challenge our modern world. We are looking together in the same direction rather than at each other. It is a method which could be replicated with advantage at the university level throughout the world.

On the basis of my experience I do not know any competent religious authority in any of the great world religions who would regard yesterday's events as anything but an atrocity and a sin against God. It is obviously vital that good teaching from a faith perspective is available in our schools because false religion flourishes in a spiritual vacuum.

But to confront some of the more personal questions which arise from yesterday's events. Another form of faith that is not so much false as immature is that as a believer one should be exempt from suffering and loss.

It is of course true that if you practice the cardinal virtues recorded in Wisdom VIII,7 which as knights you will remember are: Be savvy, - learn all you can about God's world, learn about limits and balance be just, - be very careful how you use words, be honest, don't rush to judgment be temperate, - don't buy more than you can use, don't bite off more than you can chew, have fun but don't get smashed. be courageous - say yes to life If you practice these virtues you will be preserved from the punishment which follows folly but we follow God's Word made flesh who prayed that the cup of suffering should pass him by and yet drank from that cup in his passion and crucifixion.

God makes his appeal to us in the suffering of his human face Jesus Christ. Those sufferings reveal the injustice of the world as it is presently structured and those sufferings also reveal the depth of the divine love of a God who chooses to draw us to himself by weakness rather by a demonstration of overpowering power. God is at work loving the loveless into loving.

Even then at the worst times when there are no glib explanations, prayer to God as we see him in Jesus and experience his presence is transforming. Resting in the presence of God, weeping, crying out at the injustice and waste of it all is transforming. The pain is not taken away but as we go beyond ourselves into God the pain does not turn into destructive passion that can do harm to ourselves and to others. It may even be that the brokenness that comes with grief shared with God can open us up to others at an altogether deeper level and enable us touch those who are themselves suffering at a level so deep that words fail.

So finally my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Take unto you the whole armour of God that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand.

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